Had one for a short time. The rabbits hated it, and the doe would attack it and flip it over. If it didn’t stress out the bunnies so much I would have kept it for that entertainment value.
Tesla still doesn’t have a real self driving car, which is a much, much easier task than cleaning an office space, even just vacuuming under the conditions that @Brainspore mentioned:
I’m sure someone thought, “Well, there are fewer of us in the office now, so…” without thinking about how much filthier everything was going to get now that people were being forced to live there. At some point they’re going to have to hire someone new - that may have been the plan all along, but they just wanted someone more pliable and cheaper. Though the guy who thought the jobs could be automated is very much going to “find out.”
It wasn’t Elon who claimed robots would do the cleaning, though. There’s clearly a bunch of people there who have never cleaned anything in their lives, never paid attention to anyone else cleaning, and therefore have no idea what’s required - and apparently have no idea how well automation (doesn’t) work these days.
The “let’s have robots do all the work” crowd are watching automation take over white collar jobs which were pretty dumb and/or are being replaced by AI that’s grossly insufficient, but free (e.g. in translation), and think that manual labor must be easier to replace, when the opposite is true. Any manual labor that could be automated has already been. (Vacuum cleaners and carpet shampooers were that automation for janitorial work.) Some of the poorest paying jobs are some of the most resistant to automation, and will be for many decades to come (if they can be automated at all).
LOL, no. That’s a position based on ignorance of the reality of automation. Software has replaced - and continue to replace - a bunch of white collar jobs, but it does so poorly. What this means is that at least portions of that job end up having to be done by a human who did related work. That simply doesn’t work for something like cleaning, if you’ve gotten rid of your cleaning staff.
First of all, we don’t have machines even remotely capable of that kind of work, nor will we for the foreseeable future. It’s all the hardest jobs in automation rolled into one - you need extremely sophisticated spacial awareness (of both environment and objects within it), an actual understanding of the environment sufficient be able to distinguish things that need cleaning from things that don’t (e.g. is that a scuff mark on the floor or a painted line?), an understanding of what the thing is that needs cleaning and how best to do so (is that dirt on the carpet? gum?), an ability to identify unexpected cleaning issues (there’s a scuff mark on the wall, someone put trash on the bathroom counter), and it needs a machine with the flexibility and capabilities of a human body to actually do the work. None of those things exist in reality. (And if they could, they’d cost a hell of a lot more than even well-paid cleaners.)
Second, automation that cleans poorly means you still need a fucking cleaner. Janitorial work has already undergone automation - vacuum cleaners, carpet cleaners, etc.; further automation doesn’t save money, overall, much less entirely replace the worker (which is what we’re talking about here). Cleaning a floor poorly, for example either means it still needs to be cleaned, or it’s actually dirtier than it was before - ask anyone whose Roomba smeared pet shit all over their floor about that. Even if you had autonomous machines that did highly specific jobs really well (except, again, these machines don’t exist), you still have cleaning that needs to be done, and you can’t just push the remaining work onto, say, your accounts manager.
Many of those tasks being highly contextual, unforeseen and based on a human understanding of the world (i.e. can’t be automated without a near-human level AI in a robot body of near human capabilities).
Yes, you’ve already done the work that allows it to function efficiently - making sure there’s no mess on the floor that the Roomba will make worse, making sure the furniture is properly situated, etc. That needs to be done constantly, which means someone needs to be there to do that work. Except, in an office environment, no one would be doing that. Except, you know, the cleaning staff, who would also have to be walking in front of the thing to pick up any messes, moving chairs, etc. You’ve saved little to no labor in that situation, and at best your labor/equipment cost trade-off doesn’t make economic sense.
Are you asking for something that automatically cleans your ass? (that would be a Japanese smart toilet) or something that automatically cleans your toilet? Because that second job is really, really difficult. At best you’d get a system that just sprays your toilet down with a high-pressure jet of water, requiring you to have a bathroom designed for getting very wet.
Mostly H1-B hostages at this point, from what I’ve read. The hard-core Muskies aren’t so great in number.
I can’t imagine that - the management seem like they’d see that kind of work as beneath people like them (i.e. genius knowledge workers), so it wouldn’t even occur to them to demand it. Also they’d probably realize that based on per-hour costs, it wasn’t the best use for programmers’ time.
See: Charles Stross’ Quantum of Nightmares on replacing service jobs with bad AI, people in robot costumes and gags…
Now that I think about it, we’d probably sooner have robots automating office tasks before effective full service housekeeping bots. Or sooner yet, obviating that job altogether because «gasp» office work is done from home.
Speaking as a tech person, having anything like this around a bunch of tech people is going to be a bad idea. It won’t take long for someone to use them for pranks or other shenanigans. They would probably be destroyed within a week.
Thinking practically, sure you can buy a fleet of industrial Roomba-style robots to sweep or mop the floors, but who’s going to clean and disinfect the countertops, kitchens, toilets, windows, refrigerators, sinks, and other surfaces? Who will sweep away cobwebs and air vents? Who will empty the trash?
Who’s going to clean and maintain the robots? These things aren’t self-sufficient.
Today’s cleaning robots aren’t Rosey from the Jetsons.
An eight hour day? This is Twitter, under the iron fist of Reichsmarshall Musk! The poor drones working for him will be lucky if they get five minute breaks every seven hours and a three-hour sleep break.
Most people who say things like this have never been part of an automation development project.
The truth is, most attempts at creating automations of human work activities are of low quality and it takes a really long time to get to get to that level. Just about every robot on the market (except for those doing the simplest and most repeatable tasks) sucks.
Humans often underestimate the number of decisions, movements, judgement calls, process variability involved with the most simple activities. And when you create an automation routine for a robot, you need to program out each and every scenario.
Each and every scenario also needs a good, solid trigger for the automation to know which logic path it needs to follow to solve a problem. For something a simple as dusting or cleaning a work desk, I’d bet that decision tree has many thousands of branches and not enough triggers for the bot to always know what comes next.
No one will be automating building cleaners out of jobs anytime soon.
Come shit in a bucket by your bed for the glory of Twitter kids!
Hope they don’t get bedbugs… I guess.
Maybe not literally, but I’m sure there’s plenty of H-1B employees who don’t have many options.
Haha! I can see it now.
I manage a community pool, and even the fabulously expensive pool robot we have for the big pool is not without its own suboptimal moments of performance. I can only imagine something going wrong with Oreo-size Toiletba® and the dang thing crawls outta the toilet, and maybe even out of the bathroom. [shudder!]
tl;dr apparently this known problem has been solved, whatever that means.
Yes. The tub-ba especially, and should be standard equipment for every college dorm bathroom and flatshare.
I can dream.
I agree that one design could likely be a sopping-wet bathroom, which is hardly a fit for an office environment in some faceless no-operable-windows modern building.
It’s not like public bathrooms are all that clean as currently designed, anyway:
Masking up indoors has never made more sense than now.
They came up with a solution for the pet poop.
Having only one biohazard suit available, a better outcome for everyone else would have Musk – his company’s most serious hazard – wearing the suit.
We’re overthinking this with Roombas and other robots. Just use the technology in self-cleaning ovens.
“Defecated in improvised catchment basin while staying on task.”
“Organized ad hoc feces removal committee, resulting in a 37% decrease in team members passing out on company time.”
Maybe he’s now expecting his employees to hold it in and sleep at their workstation seats. In Musk’s mind, constipation and dead tiredness actually demonstrates loyalty.
In “Epideme” (1997), Kryten mentions completing his Bachelor of Sanitation course at “toilet university” many years prior, where he studied the “lavatorial sciences”.
[quote=“Shuck, post:83, topic:236999”]
Are you asking for something that automatically cleans your ass? (that would be a Japanese smart toilet) [/quote]
… isn’t that a bidet?
I seem to recall several years ago that some company made a ‘self-cleaning’ public toilet; IIRC, it ended up being a system that rotated waterproof covers over the toilet paper, and a handful of high pressure nozzles that literally hosed down the entire room with a pre-mix of water and sanitizer or something. It probably didn’t work too well and/or was massively expensive, because it if worked well, wouldn’t we have seen competitors building them?
Uh, sure- let’s heat the entire room to 500 degree Fahrenheit for a couple hours; we didn’t need that toilet paper, or the soap, or the paper towels anyway, right?
(Oh, and you’d also have to clean the ashes out anyway. Sarcastic comments demand sarcastic dead-pan answers…)
No Rosie the Robots for us, eh?
Should we get robot cleaning robots?
Of course, roombas are not smart enough to not roll over poop from your pet and spread it all over your house… See @FGD135’s post up above… and several others…
She deserves a break now and then too.
Maybe it was close enough and the Roomba accidently summoned Satan’s confused little doggo.
I heard from someone that musk is so mentally efficient that all of his intake is converted to brain power… No pooping.
